Vonage- Anyone have it?

[Neilk]

I am thinking about getting Vonage. How's the quality? I am especially interested in their Softphone so that I can call the US when I am abroad using my parent's DSL line in Europe. Has anybody tried it?

I'd be happy to give you a referal credit to the first person that helps. Just PM or E-mail me after your post.

Thanks,

[onewhippedpuppy]

Hey Neil, I have Vonage, and have overall been happy with it. There's a little bit of white noise in the background that you don't get on a landline, but it's still decent quality. I had a problem with the first phone adapter not getting along with my modem, they sent me a replacement, no questions asked. My phone bill went from a minimum of $60 a month with those bastards at SBC to about $20. Overall, I highly recomend.

[Don 944 LA]

I use Skype on my PCs and Pocket PC. when I'm away from house, I can use the constant network on my phone for my Pocket PC etc ....

Plus it's all free

[onewhippedpuppy]

Don, is Skype a broadband phone like Vonage? The free part sounds good.

[Don 944 LA]

Originally posted by onewhippedpuppy
Don, is Skype a broadband phone like Vonage? The free part sounds good.

http://www.skype.com/

[azasadny]

Couple of guys at work have Vonage and they are very happy with it. I'll be switching to VOIP as soon as my home improvement project is finished. I will use either Vonage or Packet8.

[VaSteve]

Let's bump this up for the new year. They advertise it like crazy. Anyone else get this? How does it work with your home alarm? 911? etc?

Thanks!

[red-beard]

1st, I have VOIP with both my Timewarnercable and with vonage.

The TWC was working ok, but, then the Modem quit. I had to go to TWC 3 times to get a modem that worked as both a modem and the phone. And appearently, the phone and the cable modem share bandwidth, so you lose some modem capability. The phone quality is so so, and has some clipping. TWC also has noted that different modem/phone's produce different results. And they are out of the good units.

Vonage. I have hooked it up to our business cable modem. I have to hook it though the router since we are setup for a VPN and have a fixed IP address for the VPN. The phone quality is terrible. We can not understand each other on this phone. The bandwidth on this connection is 2.5M down and 750K up, so we should not have a problem.

So, no I can't reccomend. I will be playing with it some more.

[onewhippedpuppy]

My Vonage is fine, except for going through two phone boxes in three years, replaced for free. Customer service is so-so, but that's par for the course nowadays. Quality is fine with a cable connection, not perfect but just fine for normal conversation. Works well with a fax machine, and doesn't seem to change connection speed for the internet. The one time I called 911 to report an accident it worked like normal. The standard features it came with were nice too. Best of all, it's cheap. I'd do it again.

[onewhippedpuppy]

That would explain why mine doesn't seem to affect the quality of my internet. My wife's remote desktop connection for work is not affected either. One other nice point is I have mine set up to automatically forward to my cell phone in the instance of an outage. So the times that I have lost cable service or power, people can still call me.

[ubiquity0]

I use Sunrocket.

The setup kit is free, including 2 free phones.
I paid a year in advance, which works out to around $16 a month unlimited calls (including any taxes etc.). If I cancel before the year is up I get the unused portion refunded.

For $16 a month I am happy. There has been an occasion when the line was down (people couldn't call in).

[Joeaksa]

Another vote for Skype. Computer to computer the quality is better than a normal phone, and free. Can get some lead/lag with calling a normal phone using the computer but no worse than a normal overseas call.

I used it all over the world the last month and fell in love with it. As well you can call 800 calls from overseas, which is impossible at times otherwise.

JoeA

[azasadny]

We tried Vonage over our local municipalitie's broadband (cable modem) connection and it was terrible. I couldn't hear anything clearly and others couldn't understand us. It was terrible, cheap, but terrible... We tried it for several months and then finally gave up. I don't know if the fault was Vonage or our cable modem, but our phone is too important to have it go down frequently and the voice quality was intolerable.

[Halm]

We tried it for about 90 days over our fractional T-1. Quality was at best "so-so". Lots of cool features but in the end, we canceled. We'll try Time-Warner VoIP when they take over the terrible Adelphia service in our area early this year.

[red-beard]

I just ran local Road Runner speed tests with and without the vonage phone

Not using phone: 1700-1850 kbps
Using Phone: 600-750 kbps
With the Vonage phone box removed 2000-2300 kbps

[red-beard]

The clipping is one way only: The vonage phone clips outgoing voice. Sound quality coming in is fine.

[jriera]

Neil, got Vonage about 6 months ago and using my 5Mb line cable modem I'm a happy camper, never had a router outage, drop call, etc., quality of the voice is good, I also use Skype but mostly for work (I work with a bunch of geeks). As Wayne I have a 2nd 'normal' wired line but mostly because is a company line. I have the cable modem, routers, etc in a UPS just in case.

[red-beard]

Can someone who is happy with Vonage do a tracert for me? I just ran a tracert here and there are more than 30 hops between me and vonage.

[onewhippedpuppy]

I'm out of town, otherwise I'd give it a shot. We have tried using our box at my in-laws with their crappy Sprint DSL, and it was awful. Very distinct lag, clipping, dropping calls, and horrible quality. But, their connection sucks, it boots me off of the internet on my laptop every time their home phone rings, so it may not be entirely Vonage's fault.

[jriera]

red-bear, 14 hops for me using Cox in Las Vegas:
2 for my network, 6 for Cox, 3 for Level13 in LA, 3 for Alter.Net (1 LA and 2 NYC) and then vonage